“In the Christian life, we are all about purity because God’s Word speaks to that,” she said. “But there’s a difference in the rules-based thinking [that] this is what’s going to keep you safe. This is what’s going to keep you from falling into sin, is by having these external rules.”
Jeremy quoted Jesus’ words in Matthew 15:11, stating, “It’s not what goes into a man that defiles him. It’s what comes out of the man. For out of the mouth speaks the intentions of the heart.” He also cited Ezekiel 36, in which God says he will give his people a new heart. “Obedience from the heart,” said Jeremy. “Read Romans 6, Romans 8. Obedience from the heart, where I want to serve God.”
Connecting Bill Gothard’s Teachings to Sexual Abuse
Jeremy then turned to an example of how the false belief that evil is external, rather than being a heart problem, plays out in a harmful way in real life. “When it comes to a subject like sex,” he said, young people are told “it’s unclean. It’s impure. It’s not to be spoken of. It’s pushed out.”
And when it comes to modesty, “The woman and her body is the source of lust,” said Jeremy. “And so if you can’t get rid of the women, you cover them up. And if they’re not covered up, it’s their fault that the man falls into sin. And I’ll prove this to you from Gothard’s own teaching.”
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Jeremy displayed to the camera a resource from Gothard called “Counseling Sexual Abuse” that has surfaced online since the news broke about Joseph Duggar. “It’s talking to, how do you counsel a young woman who’s been abused?” Jeremy said, “and the whole thing is skewed.”
The resource downplays the importance of the body, minimizes the crime of abuse, and puts blame on the victim. “Listen to this,” Jeremy said, reading the resource. “Why did God let it happen? A result of defrauding by immodest dress, indecent exposure, being out from the protection of your parents, being with evil friends.”
“So upset,” Jinger interjected. “That is just, that is so insane. And it’s on the victim, he puts all that on the victim because you caused that person to do that crime.”
“It makes young men who are deviant in their behavior victims of the woman’s body,” Jeremy agreed, but “it’s exactly the reverse, right?…We have sinful hearts. And so, we’ve got to deal with the heart. And the only way to deal with that is by Christ giving you a new one.”
Jinger shared that Gothard’s teachings led her to feel shame about her own body, to the point where she wished she “didn’t have any shape at all” so that “I could feel more comfortable.”
“I just basically wanted to wear a potato sack,” she said, “because I thought that’s how I’m going to honor God.”
Women ought not to be reduced to sexual objects, said Jeremy. A woman is “an image bearer made in the image of God to reflect him in all of his beauty and his attributes of creativity and the design of the imago dei stamped upon the woman.”
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“But that sort of teaching sees the woman as a threat. And so it suppresses the woman,” he said, “and it also suppresses the young man’s processing of desire ‘cause hormones are real…They’re not talked to about it. They’re told that’s dirty and wrong and it’s just suppressed.”
